The massive victory of the Islamist parties in the Egyptian general
elections received its official imprimatur last weekend, and the country
appeared headed for a major constitutional tussle between the ruling
Supreme Military Council and the emergent parliament.

Egypt announced that, after three bouts at the polls and a number of
individual run-off elections, the main 498-member lower house of
parliament, the People's Assembly, which convened this week, will have
235 representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and 121 from the Salafist
al-Nour party and its affiliates. Together they will hold 71 percent of
the seats--47.18 percent for the Brotherhood and 24.29 percent for
al-Nour). The house will contain another ten "moderate" Islamists from
the New Center Party. The centrist and traditional al-Wafd Party will
have thirty-six members, and the liberal bloc will have thirty-three
seats. The "Revolution Continues" party, representing the leaders of the
Facebook and Tweeter generation that featured so prominently in the
demonstrations that ultimately toppled the old regime, won only 2
percent of the vote.

Given the nature of the gradual democratic takeover of the state by
the Muslim Brothers, many observers see the victory of Hamas‚ the
Palestinian offshoot of the Brotherhood, in the 2006 Palestinian general
elections as the true herald of the revolutionary change in the
Egyptian polity (and perhaps of the so-called Arab Spring in general,
given its evident Islamist trajectory).

Fresh mass demonstrations are scheduled this week in Cairo's Tahrir
Square, marking the one-year anniversary of the demonstrations that
overthrew the regime of Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt since 1981. The
demonstrators likely will press the army to relinquish its hold on power
and subordinate itself to the popular will, meaning accept
parliamentary oversight and control of its budget and operations. But
many liberal Egyptians suspect that the Brotherhood and the army have
already secretly struck a power-sharing deal that will sideline both the
secularist liberals and the al-Nour Salafists. If so, the protests will
be symbolic and pro forma and will pass quietly.

At the end of this week, Egypt will hold its first elections for
parliament's upper house, the Shura Council. After these are completed,
the two houses are scheduled to set up a committee to formulate the
country's new constitution. The military, headed by General Tantawi,
will likely seek to retain its independence from civilian control and
possibly its actual control of the state. Elections for the presidency
are scheduled for June. The Brotherhood months ago announced that it
will not field a candidate from the party ranks--but, given its electoral
success, there can be little doubt that it will either eventually put
forward a candidate of its own or advance the cause of a straw man of
its choosing.

Observers expect the Muslim Brotherhood, which is likely to form a
coalition government with the small centrist-secular parties rather than
with its Islamist competitors from al-Nour, to focus in the coming
months and years on sorting out Egypt's internal problems--consolidating
its hold on power, battling the flight of foreign investors, reducing
unemployment, shoring up crumbling infrastructure and reviving foreign
tourism. Thus, it probably will forego its traditional foreign-policy
agenda of breaking with the West and annulling the 1979 peace treaty
with Israel. The Egyptian economy can ill afford the loss of the annual
American foreign-aid subsidy of $1.5 billion.

But events may confound expectations, as often happens in the Middle
East. The core elements of the Brotherhood ideology--anti-Westernism,
anti-Semitism, sharia fundamentalism--may come to the fore despite the
wishes of (at least ostensibly) more pragmatic leaders. Earlier this
month, the spiritual leader of the movement, Muhammad Badia, defined the
resurrection of a "world-embracing Islamic caliphate" as the "goal" of
the Brotherhood. This must be done in stages, he wrote: First, the
individual person must be reformed, "then the family must be built, then
the society and the state, and [then] the just caliphate that will
guide the world."

In recent weeks, other Brotherhood spokesmen, such as deputy leader
Rashad Bayumi, have repeatedly declared that the Israeli-Egyptian peace
treaty will have to be reviewed by "the people," implying the eventual
holding of a referendum. The treaty was signed, on the Egyptian side, as
Bayumi put it, "far from the eyes of the people and parliament,"
meaning by the unrepresentative, undemocratic Sadat regime. Bayumi also
declared that the movement would "never recognize Israel, under any
circumstances. [Israel] is a conquering entity." He was referring not to
the semi-occupied West Bank, largely populated by Palestinian Arabs,
but to the state of Israel itself, which in Islamist discourse is said
to be situated on and occupying Arab-Muslim land. Bayumi's statement, in
an interview in the Arabic language daily Al Khayat, contradicted assurances given to Washington by other Brotherhood spokesmen that it would not harm Egyptian-Israeli relations.

External factors could also upend the Brotherhood's intention to
focus on Egypt's internal problems. Palestinian militants have recently
renewed their low-key rocketing of Israel from the Hamas-controlled Gaza
Strip, which may lead to a new bout of major Israeli-Palestinian
violence. A Brotherhood-led Egypt may find it difficult to stay aloof
from such a conflict. And above all looms the Iranian nuclear crisis,
which may yet lead to an Israeli-Iranian confrontation. At Iran's
bidding, that would probably suck in Hezbollah of Lebanon and Hamas of
Gaza. In such an event, the newly configured Egypt wouldn't likely stay
on the sidelines.